Reliability is key when completing a project requires a number of students to perform tasks in concert, each relying on the stability and performance of their own workstation. Such projects require both students have software standardized and certified across all the workstations they'll be using, and that technical problems not lay any of the machines low, disrupting any aspect of the project. Such a project was the student creation of a website for the Philadelphia Fire Fighters Memorial.

Integrated into The Art Institutes' courses are extensive opportunities to aid local communities and non-profit organizations. Each year 5000 students donate over a quarter of a million hours to local charity projects. Instructor Karen Girton-Snyder organizes her Integrated Multimedia class around just such volunteer projects.

Previous class projects included creating a CD-ROM memorial for the Philadelphia police department and the loved ones of police officers. While working on the fire fighters memorial Website, students also ran a workshop with a local boy's and girl's club, showing the nine and ten year olds how to use Photoshop and make embedded movies in QuickTime.

"The class is designed to be a real world experience of working with a non-profit organization," said Girton-Snyder. "Students act as project managers, graphic designers, researchers, and programmers to work as a team and create what the client wants."

A representative of the fire department, Tim McShea, came in and met with the students, bringing with him a model of the site, a perspective on what the memorial represented, and a batch of research materials. The students brainstormed to determine the look and feel of the website, as well as what content to include in each of the site's seven sections. Information gatherers then collected pictures and data for use in the website.

Michael Mowla, 22, worked with the programming team, designing the site's Flash introduction and the timeline. Using Macromedia Flash tools, Mowla selected a series of images of fire fighters and set them to music chosen by the student in charge of audio and the project manager. "I wanted the introduction to set the tone of the website, to use pictures that best portrayed the duty firefighters performed, and to give a sense of what they endured."

Students did the programming almost exclusively in the classroom during the weekly four-hour class time, with Girton-Snyder providing oversight. The class of 14 spent seven weeks working on the site. They used the HP xw5000 workstations with Pentium 4 processors at 2.4GHz with a 533MHz front side bus, dual channel PC2100 (266 MHz) DDR memory, 1GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA Quadro4 980 XGL graphics card. The students worked primarily with Macromedia Flash, Photoshop, and JavaScript to build the website.

Girton-Snyder sees benefits for standardizing one brand of workstation throughout classrooms. "The biggest is knowing what to expect. The Tech Department also make a ghost for each lab and they are set up almost exactly the same." Ghost discs store a snapshot of every bit on a systems hard drive and enable administrators to quickly "clone" a given system configuration.

The site, which can be found here, was well received by the fire department and the instructor, said Michael. "We've had responses from some of the families that had loved ones in the fire department who said it was a good tribute."